“But we’re part of the Elder Races,” Grace said.
“To some people we’re not,” Olivia replied. “Sure, we’re witches, but we’re human. A lot of them want the inhuman Elder Races to move their governments to an Other land and be treated as foreign countries.”
“That isn’t feasible,” Grace said, still frowning. “They’re as much a part of our society as the fifty states. None of the demesnes are going to uproot and change their locations.”
Olivia shrugged. “That isn’t stopping people from trying. Anyway, things got pretty heated in the last election, with lots of demonstrations and name-calling. Just something for you to think about when you’re dealing with Brandon.”
Grace shook her head. She still didn’t see how any of that applied to her. As the Oracle, she was supposed to remain neutral and treat all petitioners alike. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have personal opinions. But she couldn’t imagine anyone would care about what she thought about politics. “Well, I know the witches’ grapevine is very active. If they all know each other, maybe Brandon’s attitude has influenced the others.”
“Maybe.” Olivia gave her a slight smile. “I’m not sure I’m the best resource for you to ask, since I don’t belong to a clique and I don’t gossip. Clearly I’m not part of the ‘in’ crowd today.”
Grace sighed. She said bluntly, “I like you.”
The other woman laughed. “I like you too. What’s more, I respect the hell out of you for what you’ve taken on with the kids. A lot of young women your age wouldn’t have done it.”
“I had to,” Grace said. “I love them.” She was also the only one who could pass on to the children what she had been taught about their family and heritage.
“Well, still, kudos to you. If you ever get away from the munchkins, stop by the library some time for coffee.”
Surprised pleasure bloomed. “I’d like that. Thanks.”
Grace and Olivia reached the back meadow. Four men had taken on the chore of mowing and had gotten roughly half of the meadow finished. Brandon was using Grace’s riding mower, and the other three had brought their own, hauled behind pickup trucks and SUVs on small flatbed trailers. At the moment all four mowers were quiet and abandoned, the engines turned off. The men were standing and talking in a cluster near the door to the cavern, which stood open.
Either Grace’s Power bristled again, or she did. She swiped the back of a hand across her warm, damp forehead as she and Olivia reached the men. “That door wasn’t un-locked and open when you found it, was it?” she asked tersely. She had been tired and preoccupied when Don and Margie had come, but she hadn’t been that careless, had she?
“No,” Brandon said as the men clustered around the two women for glasses of iced tea. “We unlocked it. I was going to wait and go down with you, but then I went ahead and checked the tunnel and cavern’s ceiling and walls, myself. It looks fine from the inside for now. Did you notice how much erosion has occurred on this side of the path? It’s developed a fissure down the side of the bluff. You need to keep an eye on this and check the tunnel and the cavern on this side after a strong storm.”
“I think you should put some stones or tree stumps along that,” said one of the other men. “Make the path safer in the dark. If you use the path much in the dark.”
“Well, no,” Grace said. “But occasionally it’s unavoidable, and an accident would not be good.”
She had been aware of the fissure erosion and had been keeping an eye on the path, although it had not occurred to her to watch the tunnel and the cavern from the inside. Brandon could have waited to talk about this until he got back to the house. It wasn’t urgent enough to warrant the effort it took her to make the trek. Probably the whole point behind asking her and Olivia to come out was to get cold drinks brought back while they stood around and talked for a half hour. She felt a surge of irritation, which was totally unreasonable, given how much time they were volunteering. When Brandon offered to haul a truckload of stones over next week to shore up the widening gap, she felt like even more of a bitch.
Olivia and Grace collected the glasses when the men had polished off the last of the gallon of tea. Grace took one last look at the open doorway.
“Don’t forget to lock that,” she told Brandon.
“We won’t,” Brandon said, his blue eyes watchful.
But he was always watchful.
She could still feel him watching as she turned to leave.
The group finished all their projects and called the work day to an end just after five thirty. Everything on Grace’s list had been accomplished and the hole in the backyard fence repaired. Despite whatever personal tensions might have existed throughout the day, she made a point of thanking each one individually when they left.
“Call me sometime next week?” she said to Brandon as he was leaving.
“What?” He looked blank.
“You were going to bring a truckload of stones over?” she prompted.
“Oh, right. Sure. I’ll call you.”
Well, that didn’t sound promising. She stifled another surge of irritation. Dammit, she hated it when people threw out offers but didn’t follow through.
The last to leave, Olivia gave her a quick hug. “Stop by for that coffee,” Olivia said. “Or give me a call sometime if you think you can get away for lunch. I just need a few hours’ notice.”
“Thank you,” Grace said, warming to the older woman all over again. “I will.”
Then Olivia was gone as well, and Grace was left alone with her thoughts.
She didn’t even have to clean up the kitchen. Somebody had already done it for her. The house was clean and silent, and the main issues on the property were taken care of, at least for now. As far as the roof went, she had a few months to try to figure something out. She looked out the kitchen door window. Most importantly, the backyard was trimmed, tidy and useable again.
She would stop at the toy store tomorrow morning before she went to pick up the kids and use the rest of the hundred dollars she had gotten from Don and Margie to buy a small plastic pool and some glow-in-the-dark stars for Chloe and Max’s bedroom.
For now, she could relax. Maybe she could take that bubble bath she had been promising herself for a week, before she called Khalil and went on a date.
Holy gods, a date. With a Djinn.
Grace was almost positive she had hallucinated that part. She thought instead of relaxing, she might tie herself up in knots instead. She knew Khalil had only decided to go on a date on a whim, because the thought had amused him. Whereas she would either get ready for the date in a complete panic or take the smart route and call the whole thing off.
She couldn’t explain the impulse that gripped her next. Instead of relaxing, panicking or cancelling, she strapped on her knee brace, slipped out of the house and for a second time, she walked the length of the property to the back meadow.
Without distracting conversation, she could hear the wind sighing in the trees. The land seemed to doze in the early evening heat. She smelled freshly cut grass. She looked along the edges of the clearing, along the path, studied the eroded area carefully.
She didn’t know what she was looking for. Something.
Why would Brandon call Olivia to tell her she wasn’t needed today? Did he do that with the other people who hadn’t shown up? And if so, why did he tell her in such a way that implied the others had cancelled? It didn’t make sense. The day would have gone a lot quicker with more people. Unless he was trying to cherry-pick volunteer hours for his buddies?
That didn’t make sense either. Part of the function of the covens was to keep track of a witch’s service hours. It was a lot like paying union dues. Since the Oracle’s entire function was service oriented, Grace was now exempt from the tithe, but the community service tithe wasn’t onerous, just five hours a month, and there were always plenty of ways a witch could volunteer.
Now that everybody had left, her Power was quiescent,
the ghosts tranquil. Back in this area by the river, the ghosts she sensed were American Indian. Occasionally through the years someone would find a few arrowheads or maybe a flint knife. She suspected a tribe might have once lived here.
Taking the key from the coffee can on the lintel, she unlocked the old wooden door, pocketed the key and stepped into an area large enough to hold two sturdy Rubbermaid cabinets. She felt in the air above her head for a dangling cord, and when she had found it, she switched on the naked lightbulb that hung from the ceiling.
The Rubbermaid storage cabinets held old blankets, jackets, packages of batteries and flashlights and a couple of old-fashioned oil lamps, along with boxes of matches in zippered plastic bags to keep them from getting damp.
There was also one other item, wrapped in cloth. Grace took it out of a drawer and leaned back against the cabinet as she uncovered it. The cloth fell away to reveal a plain gold Greek mask, with stylized features, and holes for the eyes and the mouth. The face was androgynous, beautiful and blank. The style of this mask was far, far older than Agamemnon’s famous gold leaf mask that had been found at the citadel of Mycenae.
Grace regarded the mask wryly. Stunning, Carling had said when she first laid eyes on it. But Carling had seen it by flashlight, from a distance. She might have called it something else if she had studied it in the light of day.
Funny, how no one ever tried to steal the mask of the Oracle. If they had, they would soon discover it was not made of real gold, nor was it very old. Instead it was a very pretty fake. The Andreas family had sold the original mask in Europe, to the Queen of the Light Fae in Ireland, who had long had a fascination with auguries of any kind.
Her family had used the proceeds of the sale to finance their relocation to the States, to buy this land and to build on it. The only thing Grace regretted was that she didn’t have the original to sell again, because even in a depressed economy, she felt sure the original mask would sell for enough to solve all of their money problems for years.
Whereas the sale of the fake mask probably wouldn’t bring in enough to fix the roof.
Although come to think of it, that might be worth checking. Maybe somebody would like to buy the fake mask for novelty’s sake. It was a decent replica of the original.
She wrapped the mask in the cloth again, tucked it under her arm, took one of the stronger flashlights and went down the tunnel, picking her way carefully on the uneven floor to the perfect black of the cavern below. She shone the flashlight over the walls and ceiling as she went. Finally she admitted the truth: that she had bristled at Brandon going into the tunnel and cavern to check them without waiting for her. She didn’t like him poking around by himself, but her reaction was irrational. The cavern wasn’t off-limits to people, it was just off-limits to children, and that was for their own safety.
She still couldn’t explain what she was looking for.
She was just looking for something.
Was Therese anti–Elder Races, like Brandon? Was that why she had reacted so badly to Khalil’s appearance? Grace had thought it was because Therese got caught snooping. Had Therese been snooping because she had heard a rumor about a Djinn hanging around? What about Janice? Had this whole thing begun with her, because attracting a Djinn’s interest is generally not considered to be a good thing, Grace?
Spinning in circles like this made her head hurt. Worse, it made her angry. If quarterly work days were going to make her feel like this, she wanted to tell them all to fuck off. But she couldn’t do without them or the babysitting roster, unless things changed.
It all came down to the Oracle’s Power. How she used it. What she made of it.
And that came down to her.
She reached the cool, spacious cavern. After walking around and checking the entire space, she turned off her flashlight and let her eyes adjust. She had left the door propped open on the surface. A diffuse shaft of light from the tunnel cut through the absolute blackness.
Many people had a problem with caves, but Grace didn’t. She liked it down here. The cavern itself was beautiful. Not only did it call to the Power that lived inside her, but it was utterly silent and peaceful. In the darkness, it felt womblike, filled with the potential birth of limitless possibilities.
The Oracle’s moon was soon, perhaps tonight or tomorrow. She could feel the approach, especially here in the dark. It felt like a convergence, all times, the past and all possible futures, coming together.
She had been taught that she could only access the Power deep in the earth, yet it had come in daylight, and not just once. She had called it up several times now.
She’d also been told that the Oracle could not consult the Power for herself, but only for others. Yet she had called the ghost of the serpent woman and had talked with her.
What else had she been taught that was wrong, or at the very least incomplete?
Each Oracle acts as a different lens for the Power, Isalynn had said. You will bring your own strengths and abilities to the experience.
Which was exactly what? She wished she could ask her future self for advice.
She let the cloth fall away from the mask, and she held it up to her face, pretending she was a petitioner. How did they feel when they faced the mask? This time she barely touched the Power before it welled up, more readily than ever before.
The Power felt good in the dark, filling her to the brim and then spilling out into the cavern, an endless witching sea. She sensed thousands of sparks in the sea like distant glints of moonlight on water, and all the sparks were ghosts. She searched for ghosts she recognized, Petra, her grandmother, the serpent woman, but she didn’t see any of them.
Visions normally came when the Oracle used the petitioner as a focus as she called up the Power. Cuelebre had been an inferno of Power; perhaps his ferocious energy had been what had drawn the Oracle. The serpent woman had been an unusual ghost, attached to the Oracle’s Power and to Grace. For Grace to get any specific vision now, she needed more of an outside focus. Disappointed, she let go of the dark sea. She wrapped the mask up again as it began to subside.
Then something else Powerful flowed down the tunnel to join her in the dark. It was a Djinn, but unlike any Djinn Grace had met thus far. This presence was jagged with razored edges. It radiated a discordance that cut at her awareness. She held herself utterly still, thinking hard.
Then she turned on the flashlight.
The form of a tall woman, dressed in black, stood in front of her. The Djinn’s form had a lethal grace. Her ivory face was regal and fierce, a feminine version of a handsome, inhuman visage that had already become so dearly familiar to Grace. Crimson hair flowed like blood past her shoulders, and her eyes were two black, crystalline stars.
She said into the cavern’s absolute silence, “Hello, Phaedra.”
This time on Saturday nothing would interrupt Khalil’s agenda.
Djinn were cursed with a terminal curiosity. It was often their worst weakness, and sometimes it was their downfall.
Khalil was no exception. If a door was open, he peeked through it. If it was closed, it made the peeking so much better. If the door was locked, well. There was a natural progression to this sort of thing.
Things weren’t adding up, and he didn’t like it. The an-cient social contract between Oracle and petitioner, the PayPal link on the website, the general shabbiness of Grace’s home, the lack of repair. Her inability to access premium health care when she needed it the most, the unpaid bills, a cover letter to apply for a job, when she already had to do too much, had to meet too many responsibilities, was too alone.
He called in one of the multitude of favors owed to him, this time from a Djinn who had a particular facility with accessing information via the Internet. The information Khalil was interested in wasn’t particularly hard to find. Grace’s bank account balance was abysmal, and the money that the website drew in was hardly worth the breath it took to mention.
That was when Khalil grew angry. He searc
hed for his old ally Carling and her lover Rune. They weren’t in hiding, so they weren’t particularly hard to find either.
They were in a beachside villa in Key Largo.
More specifically, Carling Severan was under house arrest in Key Largo. By association, Rune Ainissesthai, the Wyr gryphon who had recently been Dragos’s First sentinel but had now become estranged from the Wyr demesne, was under house arrest too, because Rune had mated with Carling and would not leave her.
Carling was a very old, very Powerful sorceress, and a Vampyre in the late stages of the disease. The Elder tribunal had judged that the fluctuations in her Power made her too much of a danger to others. The tribunal had placed Carling under a kill order. Carling and Rune made a compelling argument for suspension of the sentence, for they claimed to have found a way to put her in partial remission.
No one wanted to execute a kill order prematurely. The social and political ramifications would be enormous. Carling had once been Queen of the Nightkind; most recently she had been a Councillor on the Elder tribunal itself. Not only that, but Rune would fight to the death for her. As a result, the Elder tribunal placed Carling under quarantine and observation for three months in order to verify the truth of their argument. Carling and Rune had just finished their first week.
So Khalil went to sunny Key Largo. The villa had an acre-length private beach. Two-story windows along one side of the main house overlooked an infinity pool beside the ocean. The property also had two guesthouses where the Elder tribunal Councillors who were Carling’s observers and jailors stayed. The prison was altogether luxurious.
The villa was shining with Power as Khalil approached. He studied it from high in the air. The Demonkind Councillor Soren, a first generation Djinn who was also of the House Marid, was one of Carling’s two wardens. Her other warden was the Elven Councillor Sidhiel. Wards had been placed all around the borders of the property, ostensibly, Khalil assumed, to keep Carling contained and not to keep others out.